NY Penn Complex Must Expand: Rail Partners Study

By Jim Mathews / President & CEO

The railroad partners working on what comes next for the busy and overburdened New York Penn Station have ruled out alternatives that don’t expand the existing station’s physical footprint, but also said during a working group meeting this week that through-running – a key component of the alternatives considered so far – remains very much on the table.

Amtrak, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), and New Jersey Transit (NJ TRANSIT) this week released the full text of the feasibility study to examine whether and how project managers could meet their goal of increasing NYP’s capacity to 48 trains per hour without physically enlarging the existing station complex beyond the streets it now touches: 31st street to the south and 33rd street to the north, as well as Ninth Ave. to the west and Seventh Ave. to the east.

Rail Passengers is taking part in the working group meetings and attended the group’s second gathering this week at Penn Station. We spent considerable time during Tuesday evening’s meeting going through the findings presented by consultants WSP, who told us that “no combination of through-running tracks and platforms within the footprint of the existing station meet the operational performance needs and can be constructed without massive and unacceptable disruption to service, including significant capital investments throughout the region.”

That finding echoed what we were told in September at the first working group meeting, when I asked for more detail on why plans that don’t involve disrupting other parts of the neighborhood seem to have been dismissed.

The project team in September cited facts which we at the Association ourselves have often used in Congress and elsewhere when advocating for substantial new investment across the Northeast Corridor – the NEC is singlehandedly responsible for enabling $100 million of American GDP every single day, and to build the required capacity more deeply underground (to preserve the existing footprint) would mean reducing service by 30 percent for about 12 years.

I also asked what was being done to speed project delivery, noting that vague timelines decades into the future would lead to evaporating public – and political – support.

“A key challenge for projects is considering potential service outages on nights and weekends. There is a very low tolerance for service changes and outages among passengers, especially since most are commuting to work. The number of projects taking place in the Northeast Corridor right now is unprecedented and all our agencies are dealing with the tradeoff between a fast project timeline and limiting service disruptions,” the team said. “If you create high enough value at the end of the process, then the pain can be worth it. We are very driven by the fact that this is public money, and we need to create the best value for the public as possible.”

On the through-running proposals, WSP reported that both the idea of underpinning the existing platforms and concourses and the idea of deep-mining well beneath the concourses would require significant reconstruction at Penn Station and would also require major investment in turnback station facilities — one in New Jersey and another in Queens or the Bronx.

“In addition to turnback stations, new train storage yards would be required both west and east of the station, each requiring significant property acquisition and subject to lengthy environmental review and permitting processes, further delaying needed improvements to the core facility at Penn Station,” WSP concluded. “The 100% through-running concepts would also render Long Island Rail Road’s West Side Storage Yard — a 35-year-old facility that provides storage for 30 trainsets — unusable. Extensive capital investment would also be required to address issues of fleet interoperability and other technical considerations among the Railroad Partners.”

Although the working group participants seemed to accept the engineering basis for the conclusions and findings, many attendees nonetheless expressed impatience with the process. Some pointed out that while the existing station was sized for about 200,000 people per day, today some 600,000 passengers and visitors flow through the facility each day and with commuter and visitor travel now recovering beyond pre-pandemic levels the need for improvements is becoming more acute and can’t wait for decades.

The challenges before this group, then, appear to be very complex. The overall policy goal of relieving congestion, getting people out of cars, and easing travel and commerce across the Northeast really does demand increasing capacity to at least 48 trains per hour. Not only that, but the Gateway project now underway is being sized to deliver many more trains to and from the station complex...so if the station doesn’t grow it could become an even more difficult chokepoint for the vital Northeast Corridor.

At the same time, the team needs to think about building a facility that is sized for the future as well as for present needs, while addressing human concerns, and minimizing disruption and harm to the surrounding community. The excesses of infrastructure development over the past century which isolated neighborhoods and displaced thousands of people from once-vibrant communities are top-of-mind for the project team.

And of course, you can spread a layer of old-school political realities involving New York City, New Jersey, the State of New York, just to make planning the project even harder to manage.

Our next meeting later this month will involve some alternative ideas for the group to assess, and in any case it’s clear that whatever results will still go through the formal public comment process. The project team is making all of its materials available to the public beyond the working group on an open website, which you can reach by clicking here. The tradeoffs aren’t yet in full view, but whatever they are it’s likely that they’ll generate a lively debate among the working group’s very diverse members.